Shogun 2 Total War silly questions

[Lvcretivs]

[...] Well-made mods do increase the replayability; but sufficiently for the many buyers to be still playing the game 18 months later when the next game comes out? [...]

A valid point, but this seems actually be the case with R:TW - four years after it's release - which evidently has a fairly thriving fan/modding community with major projects both announced and released. On the other hand - are eg. the 'hardcore' EB I players really statistically representative?

Mods can be a threat to DLC, I agree, but just how much revenue are we talking about here? [...]

That's quite a critical point - I completely agree with you that such an 'analysis', if based on rather shaky, probably unrealistic assumptions about expected profits shouldn't be taken very seriously - but this article, focusing on console games,as well as the second half of this article could possibly clear up the issue - and the underlying economical/PR concepts - a bit (insofar as these aspects are transferable to PC strategy games...). I confess, I'm not very good at economics, so don't build on my reasoning...;)

[...] Personally, I question if DLC is worth the developers' time in the first place: they should be focusing on the next game, or the next expansion, rather than serving up skin-packs and minor campaigns. In other words: DLC is always going to be overpriced to make it worth it for the developers. This being the case, even without mods available DLC will never be a major source of income.

Again a perfectly valid and convincing point, that raises an rather interesting (cf. the OP ;), speculative question: What if DLC should rather be seen as instrument of an medial 'image policy', creating the illusion of 'customers/fanbase support' in an desperate attempt to reestablish the endangered 'qualitative superiority' of SEGA/Activision? A further, if not primary purpose of distributing DLC could as well be effective camouflage of 'creative/technical stagnation' on the developer's part - a situation owned to the TW franchise's peculiar position on the genre crossroads between RTS and TBS - eg. compensating the lack of advanced strategic/tactical AI with cosmetic 'eyecandy' and new 'features' geared towards an not so discerning audience...?

EDIT: A rather interesting and critical blog entry about 'Sun Tzu as an AI Design Guide?'